I'm off on holiday on the 26th so my blog will be quiet for a bit, but fear not! No doubt I'll manage to squeeze in a little bit of work before I go and do another sneaky post! And there will certainly be lots to blog about when I'm back as I'm going to Florence, Italy. Volcano permitting, all seems well for our flight but it's still going to be a matter of waiting until the very last minute to be sure. Fingers crossed! I'll be keeping a travel sketchbook while I'm there so there should be some amusing things to post when I get back. I keep meaning to scan and post my travel sketchbooks from Japan and Prague too so maybe I'll do a Travel Sketchbook Bonanza Post!

A huge thank you to anyone who has left comments on my blog the last week; I still find it annoying that you can't reply directly to any comments like you can on Livejournal, so if you haven't heard from me, please don't think I'm ignoring you! I've had some great feedback on my daily comic which I'm really enjoying at the moment. I try to keep one day ahead of myself so I don't get backlogged, but being on holiday means only being able to pencil them and then spending a day inking, scanning and colouring when I'm back. At least there will be an uber daily comics post to look forward to!

Thursday, 22 April 2010

Technically, the Hopkinsville Goblin(s) case is more akin to an alien encounter than cryptozoology, but I just love the story behind them and the thought of what they're like! I've always been into stuff like this, since I was a kid, and while my belief in alien encounters, Bigfoot, screaming skulls, sea monsters, Jersey Devils and the like may be skeptical, I can't help but love the ideas behind anything unexplained. If anything, it makes prime drawing fodder! :P

Tuesday, 20 April 2010

Four daily comics in one handy chunk! Since drawing the one about my computer, I've become a tad obsessed with digging out my old computer. Not a Spectrum unfortunately - he's long gone - but my Amiga 500+. I swear I'm getting worse when it comes to video games...

I've decided to draw a daily comic; more because I think it would be good to have something to draw every day and make a habit of it. Bear in mind when I say "comic" and "daily", I mean them in the loosest sense of the words! This will by no means be a diary comic; I tried that once before and just decided that as well as hating drawing myself, I hated drawing my day-to-day life. Other people have done, and do it better than me and I just felt I was copying them and not doing a very good job of it! So this will be more abstract and odd, but hopefully enjoyable too.

A bit of a Transformers themed post today; I've been having a great time painting and drawing TF characters, although my sense of symmetry leaves a lot to be desired! I'm aiming to get several more characters drawn in order to make some sticker packs for the Bristol Comic Con. Hopefully people will like them!

I'm going to take a short break from painting at the moment to concentrate on a few other bits that need attention. Milk Town will be getting some new stuff, namely a swanky new shop! I'm going to be using a special shop program for artists as I really just can't seem to get on with Etsy. I don't know why as it's easy to use and all but I find I dread updating it and get a bit bored when it comes to maintaining it. This one hopefully will be a lot less hassle! It will also act as my main on-line store so I can link to it from all my sites. There will also be new buildings and comics on the Milk Town website which I'm working on at the moment.

I'll be spending most of this evening working on the two t-shirt designs I'm drawing for an American horror convention. More on those soon! :P

Also, I have a Facebook page dedicated to my illustration work, so if you're about, please join and say hi!

Friday, 9 April 2010

Oyvey! The next couple of weeks are going to be a bit hectic to say the least. As well as lots of illustration work to do, I'll be going on several jaunts so I'm trying to manage my time which is something I'm particularly crap at. Huzzah! Next weekend I'll be off home to Swindon for a few days as it's my 30th birthday on the 19th of April. I'm ignoring the fact on all counts and will be watching cartoons, eating sweets and generally be trying to cling frantically to my youth before accepting the inevitable. The following weekend I'm off to London with my other half to see a live performance of the Lord of The Rings: The Two Towers soundtrack by the London Philharmonic Orchestra while the film plays - eep! I've been a huge fan of such film composers as Thomas Newman, Howard Shore, Alan Silvestri, Elliot Goldenthall and Jerry Goldsmith for as long as I can remember and I'm really really excited to see a live performance.

Then, after that weekend, we're off to Florence, Italy for a week. This is a Christmas/birthday present from my wonderful boyf and I'm so excited, I've actually stopped being excited! The last couple of holidays I've been on (Japan and Prague), I've kept a sketchbook diary. I'll be posting some pages from these over the next few days, but they're really basic! As much as I'd love to fill the pages with gorgeous landscapes and wonderful life drawing (none of which I'm actually any good at), for the most part, my travel journals are full of bubble-headed people and rude items found in rude shops. I really enjoy making them though, as it's something I do at the start and end of each day of the trip and becomes a fun routine. Looking forward to buying a new sketchbook especially!

So lots going on; I'm also working towards the Bristol Small Press Expo in May too, so a lot of my time is going into original paintings to sell. I'm getting more ideas than I can get down at the moment but as always, am really enjoying it!

Tuesday, 6 April 2010

Like many of my fellow bloggers, I'm a bit of a bookophile, so I thought I'd do a post on a few of the books that are currently in my must-read pile at the moment. When I say pile, I mean the pile on my bed that slips off in the middle of the night and scares the crap out of me; the pile in the studio on my desk and the pile on my bedside table. I really wish I had enough space for a massive bookcase, preferably with a cool sliding ladder to whizz up and down the stacks on, possibly singing some kind of musical number. A girl can dream! But anyway, here are the pages of goodness filling my time at the moment:

I've read most of Lovecraft's work but this collection has a few of the longer stories I haven't gotten around to reading. I'm trawling through The Case Of Charles Dexter Ward at the moment, which I have to say, isn't one of his better stories. But I've started it and as soon that one is finished, I can move onto At The Mountains of Madness. Anyone looking for some awesome, truly creepy horror stories should definitely give Lovecraft a go; a lot of the stories centre around creatures from another dimension that make people insane when they break through to our world. Lovecraft's stories also heavily inspire one of my favourite comic book series, B.P.R.D.

There's nothing I love more than nosing through people's sketchbooks and this book is fantastic; illustrators from all over the world share pages from their (sickeningly stunning) sketchbooks and give you a look into their creative processes. Whenever I feel a bit stuck for inspiration, I always have a flick through this. Some of the sketchbook pages in here are absolutely amazing: gorgeous full-colour spreads, amazing life drawings etc. My sketchbooks are full of doodles of ill-proportioned cartoon animals, talking poo and notes that barely even make sense to me when I read them back!

This book an absolute gem; I'm an avid follower of this blog so when this book was released I couldn't wait to get hold of it. It's chock full of amazing surface designers, card and textile designers, you name it, and has been an invaluable source of inspiration for my own greetings card designs. In a very loose sense mind you, when you look at my stuff compared to what's in here!

Ah, Stephen King. He's been criticised a lot as of late for his "pulp speed" output, but I've found a lot of his latest books to be really good. I enjoyed Cell, even though it was yet another take on a society-falling-apart-due-to-virus theme (which I can never seem to get enough of for some reason) and while it was very schlocky, it was great for that very fact. This one is a bit more of a slow burner involving a chap who loses an arm in an accident and suddenly develops the ability to paint other people's presents and the future. So far, so King: troubled lead, wise sidekick, demented old lady, malevolent force manipulating people. I'm a stickler for the classics.

Video games have pretty much dominated my life since the age of about eight; I have a hazy memory of playing Pong at my cousin's house (the one you plugged straight into the TV!) and I've been lucky enough to have followed the evolution of video games first hand from my Spectrum ZX to my Nintendo DS. Sounds silly, but to know just how far video games have come in the last 20 years is still a very exciting thing for me. Whippersnappers these days will never know the anticipation of having to wait for a game to load from a cassette for 20 minutes! This book is an awesome (if slightly outdated) look at one of my favourite pass times.

Making Watchmen stickers this weekend meant getting out this hefty tome to check costumes for characters and I forgot how good it is. I'm still slightly awed at the amount of work that went into this graphic novel, even if it took me bloody years (even after working for 3 in a comic shop) to appreciate it for what it was. There's some gorgeous artwork in here as well as sketches, skematics, storyboards, thumbnails and character design. There's even a page of doodles contemplating Dr Manhatten's willy, which makes me feel a bit better whenever I have a little giggle drawing him in the nude!

I'm a huge fan of Rotovision; they've published some great books on digital illustration and video game art so I was slightly excited when I saw this. It's a really nice book with some outstanding illustration in it; not quite as good as Illustrating Children's Books or Play Pen but it has some good tutorials and looks at all aspects of the children's book market at the moment.

My spring break is now over and I'm back in my part-time job, slightly grumpy and wishing I was at home drawing again. But I can't really complain as I got a lot done and had a bit of a break in between! The above painting was done in preparation for a one-page Transformers fan-comic I'll be drawing for my writer/colourist boyfriend. I've been putting it off, mainly because my confidence level in drawing a TF comic has been very low, but this pic has given me some confidence in actually getting it drawn. Before that, however, I'm itching to get a painting of Bumblebee and Soundwave done! :D

Saturday, 3 April 2010

Well, hopefully it can't be said that I haven't been productive these last few days. I'm having a whale of a time with the new routine I've set myself. Said routine being pretty much, get up, eat, work, eat, work, draw, sleep! I've produced some paintings and card designs, with hopefully more of each to come. Here are the spoils so far:

I'm also designing a t-shirt for an American horror convention which I'll be working on tonight. Looking forward to it! Now if you'll excuse me, Iron Man isn't going to paint himself! :P

Okay, not quite spring break but I do have 5 whole days off of which I'm hoping to get a metric poop-load of work done! Since the con, I've slowed down a tad; I've been doing work but nothing particularly postable. From today until Tuesday though I have a rather large workload planned and can't wait to get stuck in. Today was kind of put aside for general errands but I'm fully stocked and ready to not leave the house! After a rather lovely tea-and-cake chat with Katie, I headed out to a couple of art shops to get some essentials:

Canvas! Paint! Brushes! New sketchbook! Pencils! A3 rough pad! What a veritable cache of booty! Perhaps the most exciting thing bought though (and by exciting, I mean sad because I got excited when I saw them) are the two pots of indian ink. I've been scrounging every last drop I could find out of existing bottles and finally have some fresh ones! Woo!

My drawing table is a bit of a state at the moment; the pile on the left is kind of my "inbox" where current drawings are flung aside ready to be scanned and coloured.

My painting table currently houses three WIP paintings and over the next few days there should hopefully be more! I've got a huge list of superheroes, film characters and video game characters ready to be put on canvas!

General clutter.

Some of the DVDs I'll be watching while I draw in the evening; I'm avoiding any TV at all, mainly because it's crap but mostly because I have the flat to myself and can just zone out and watch some cheese! You'll notice some guilty pleasures there including the two Young Gun films and D.A.R.Y.L - an awesome '80's film that still makes me weep whenever I watch it! Think Flight of the Navigator but with a robot kid and that's pretty much the film. I've also got a hankering for some Wes Anderson movies so I've put out the fantastic The Life Aquatic and The Darjeeling Limited, which I've only seen the once. This may not seem odd but if you know me it is as I watch films a stupid number of times and by all accounts, should have seen it at least 4 times by now!

One of many shelves of DVDs in my flat; these are mixture of mine and my housemates but for the most part, I'd say about 90% are mine! The toys are mine too!

My prized Maakies toys...

The 4 dudes on the left I got in Japan; I dread to think how much I spent on toys and gachapons when I was over there...

Anyway! That's my next few days sorted! I also have a pile of greetings cards designs to scan and colour too as well as many more designs kicking about in my sketchbook to draw up. I may even be REALLY exciting and post some of my current musical inclinations too! :P